There are times when I’m tempted to fire off a response to someone. I’m passionate about ideas, especially my ideas, and when someone has disagreed with me, or made a comment that I disagree with, I like to set the record straight. I’m sure I am the only one this happens to, but hear me out.

A long-time mentor of mine used tell me, more often than I care to admit to; “keep it in draft for 24hrs before you hit send”.  In fact there was a week of my life, years ago, that he made me practice this for an entire week. It was harder than you think to pull off. But it was for a good reason.

At the time, I felt like The Karate Kid doing wax on, wax off. But, what he was really teaching me relates to so many of today’s communication mediums: email, social media, even with phone calls, voicemail and text messages.

Think about it:

• Social Media: Don’t ever forget that even though comments can be deleted later, they are forever in the internets
• Email: That recall button doesn’t always work
• Missed Phone calls: depending on the urgency of course
• Voicemail: Remember that “emergency” can mean different things to different people
• Text Messages: Make sure you have the complete message and context

There are times that responding immediately is the right move. But more times than not you will save yourself — and others — a lot of strife if you will wait before you hit send.

 

At some point in your life, if you own a mobile device, you have probably experienced the calamity that ensues when you try calling someone back immediately after dropping a call, and you’re sent straight to their voicemail. If not, you are to be congratulated and rewarded.

For the rest of us there is but one word that describes this experience: frustrating.

And yet we try again. Time and time, again hoping they will stop trying to call us at the same time, thereby blocking each other’s call. We keep counting on the other side to stop and our call will make it through, sometime we even wait a minute or two before resuming.

Frustration rises.

If only the mobile companies would fix this!? Don’t they know how frustrating it is for us?

Perhaps the issue isn’t entirely the phone company. Perhaps the issue is as much how we tend to communicate as the tool we choose to use. Perhaps we could do better. Perhaps it goes deeper than just making a phone call. It may even bleed into your communications with your spouse and with your colleagues.  If we asked them, what would they say?

Perhaps we should consider a few things:

• Two people trying to do the same thing at the same time never works for the mobile companies or, come to think about it, for any of our other communications.
• Listening completely to someone’s thoughts means that we must have some patience.  Listen, wait, and understand that there is an order of things. Consider how to engage and learn to adapt to it. Patience as we know is a virtue. And who doesn’t want virtuous conversations and communications?!

From here on out let’s take a stab at doing two things differently to address the calamity of our communications:

• First, and perhaps most importantly join me in “fixing” the dropped call debacle. When you drop a call with someone, the person who initiated the call is responsible for calling back. The other party exerts patience for the caller to call back when they are able. Simple and virtuous.
• Second, and perhaps the hardest for many of us to accomplish, listen completely before responding during your next conversation. On the phone or in person, take an extra minute to hear them out, then respond as normal. Hard to do but worth it.

I think both of these will serve you (and me) nicely, don’t you?

Until the mobile companies fix dropped calls, it’s really up to us to mold our communication habits to mitigate our own frustration. I believe we can do it. Perhaps it will lead to more than just better experiences after dropped calls.

It may just stop a bit of calamity and add some virtue to our communications. At a minimum our phone calls will be better. That’s a win.